"Dogs Who Break My Heart" by Kate Blakinger
When Joey picked me up from the animal shelter, he said he wanted to drive by the dead woman’s house, that’s all, but he pulled his truck up to the curb by her dented mailbox and cut the engine. Years in Iraq had made him morbid. A uniform’s no protection. But I didn’t protest when he lifted me at the waist. I shimmied through the kitchen window like a born trespasser, unlatching the back door to let him in.
Dishes still filled the woman’s sink in teetering stacks. There was a faint reek of garbage and hot dust. None of the kitchen chairs matched, but the placemats were all the same: sky blue and appliquéd with black and white cows wearing cowbells. My mind wouldn’t hold the two realities together, owning these placemats and being killed.
Upstairs in the bedroom, Joey told me to lie down on the dead woman’s bed. The mattress was bare. The springs pressed up against the gray cloth, and the outlines of a stain bloomed across the fabric. I covered the stain with my body. He kissed my face and I stiffened. I couldn’t relax the muscles of my stomach or the tight clench of my calves.
We were supposed to be on a date, sipping strawberry margaritas, staring across a table at each other, awaiting enchiladas brought on white plates too hot to touch. We were supposed to be talking about how we felt, and whether what we felt added up to something that outweighed the pain of not being the people we’d been before.
“Right here in bed—this is where it happened?” I asked. He’d read about the shooting online. He couldn’t stop reading about it. Something was spinning loose inside him. The VA Hospital didn’t help, sticking him on a waiting list and never calling again.
He kissed my neck. “You smell like dog food.”
“I fed a lot of dogs today.” This was true, but the dogs whose bowls I filled only just outnumbered those I injected with pentobarbital, running my hands along their backs as their eyes filmed over, just the way a skin of ice settles still and foggy overtop the glossy water of the creek.
Joey stopped trying to make out and lay on top of me, a dead weight. I could feel the shrapnel in his neck pressing into my neck, sharp remnants his skin had healed around.
“Get off,” I said.
He didn’t move.
“I can’t breathe. I don’t want to lie in this bed.”
I couldn’t go on in this way, spending days with dogs who broke my heart—they were always so happy to see me, wagging their whole butts, shaking with the pleasure of smelling my smell and hearing my voice.
Joey lifted me, laid me on the floor, and kissed me. I let him unzip my jeans and tug them down, let his hands dart over me even though it was wrong to be touched here.
“Why did you want to come to this house, where something horrible happened?” I asked.
“Something horrible is always happening somewhere.”
“I met her, you know. The woman who lived here.”
“Jesus,” he said, sitting up. “You never said anything.”
“She and my mother were friendly.” I wanted him to feel something he wasn’t. I didn’t mind lying. It was the kind of lie that lives close to the truth. Two women the same age living alone in the same tiny town—they might as well have been friends.
Joey disappeared for the bathroom, and I stood at the window, spying on the azaleas. A red-haired woman walked a German shepherd past the house.
It was like an itch, my need to be outside. I passed the closed door of the bathroom, padded down the stairs, and drifted out the front door, following the woman and her dog until they turned up a driveway. I kept walking while dusk soaked the sky a darker shade.
When I let myself into the shelter, the dogs went crazy, barking and throwing themselves against the woven metal of their cages. I inhaled the scent of skin and fur, the tang of urine. I unlocked crates, ready for teeth or tongues. Dogs gathered around me, barking, sniffing, growling, tails moving, a mass of canine agitation. My hands slipped over velvet ears and scratched furry necks.
I leashed as many as I found leashes for, and en masse, we exited the building. The dogs panted and strained. I started to run, and they ran too, yipping at the night air. We splashed right into the creek when we came to it, all of us except the Chihuahua, who ran circles on the bank.
As teenagers, Joey and I had waded in this creek. He’d pressed his lips against me for the first time while we stood in water up to our ankles. After that kiss, I’d plucked bright, shimmering stones from under the eddies. Later, I found my pockets full of ordinary pebbles, all the luster they’d borrowed from the water gone.
One dog started to bark, then another. The chill of the stream bit into me. In the dark, the water looked like it could swallow a person whole, like it might be fathoms deep. Water wasn’t what scared me. Soon, I’d step back onto land, and I wasn’t certain where I’d go next, who I would become. All I knew was I would leave. That I’d as good as left already.
Kate Blakinger lives in Philadelphia with her family. Her fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Harpur Palate, New Stories from the Midwest, and elsewhere. MacDowell, Jentel, and the Elizabeth George Foundation have supported her work. Find her online at kateblakinger.com.
